AKP winning perception war
Erdogan has been surprisingly successful in framing the graft probe in his favor, while purging the bureaucracy on an unprecedented scale.
On Dec. 17, Turkey woke up to a major graft probe. Since then, Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse has been busy reporting on the mindboggling sequence of events. The probe, which many predicted to be the end of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), has become a war of perception. If you google "graft," "bribery" or "corruption" in Turkish, you will see the focus has already shifted to a concept so far unheard of in Turkish politics (the “parallel state”), reassigning public prosecutors and police officers to different posts, condemning all sorts of “disinformation” and changing laws governing the structure of the judiciary.
On Jan. 21, during a press conference in Brussels, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “We dealt with the mafia and we finished them, we dealt with gangs and we finished them, now we are in the process of eliminating the elements of the parallel state.” As Tulin Daloglu reports, Erdogan’s popularity seems to have survived intact. How did perceptions become so detached from reality and the focus shift so drastically in just one month?
To answer this question, one needs to look at how the AKP government has dealt with the two major corruption crackdowns on Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 and other aftershocks such as trucks suspected of carrying weapons to Syria, allegedly initiated by the parallel state. The AKP’s response has been heavy-handed and uncompromising, and its most effective methods so far have been reassigning judges, prosecutors and security forces to different posts. A common joke goes that now the traffic bureau is overloaded by "parallel state" (Gulen movement) members. This is because officers in prominent offices such as those dealing with smuggling and terrorism have been relocated to less influential positions, traffic being one of them.
To understand how effective these “reassignments” have been — and many pundits agree that the process is not yet complete — we must look at the numbers. The data on the dismissal and reassigning of judges and prosecutors is available from official sources. On Jan. 21, 97 prosecutors and judges were removed from their posts. On Jan. 15, 20 judges and prosecutors were reassigned, and three prominent ones were placed under investigation. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag initiated an investigation into three prosecutors: Zekeriya Oz, Muhammer Akkas and Celal Kara.
